Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Chick Lit?

I recently watched Anthony Russo's 2006 movie "You, Me and Dupree" which stars Owen Wilson, Kate Hudson, and Matt Dillon. In the film, Wilson's character - Dillon's loveable but messy, reckless, fly- by-the-seat-of-his-pants best friend and best man - loses his job and moves in with newlyweds Hudson and Dillon only to introduce all manner of potty-humor and relationship chaos into the young lovers' household. Not exactly an art film. The narrative then follows Wilson's gradual reformation into a person of some refinement and charater and Dillon's corresponding descent into disorder, jealousy, and paranoia. Defending Wilson's improvements one night to her husband, Hudson reveals that Wilson has, in fact, been writing poetry - a revelation that Dillon reacts to by calling Wilson "a fag."

Dillon's reaction is part of a long and familiar Anglo-American history of associating poetry - which is presumably in touch with all the gooey emotional and sentimental sides of human existence - with effeminacy and homosexuality. Dino Franco Felluga's 2005 SUNY study "The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius" traces how discourses of poetry, melancholia, genius, and sexual pathology (including masturbation) converged in the nineteenth century. (In "You, Me and Dupree, in fact, poet-to-be Wilson is caught "in the act" one night by Hudson as she goes downstairs for a drink, suggesting the link between poetry and onanism is not entirely a thing of the past.) In "A Retrospect" from 1918, Ezra Pound states his desire to produce a new, masculine poetry that is "harder and saner," "nearer the bone," and "free from [the] emotional slither" that, in his estimation, characterized the effeminate verse of the genteel nineteenth century.

In post-Cold War America, perhaps no figure has dramatized the stereotypical synchronicity between gayness and poetry more humorously than Percy Dovetonsils, one of the most remembered characters created by t.v. comedian Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs's Dovetonsils appeared as a "poet laureate" who spoke with a lisp, wore a zebra-patterned smoking jacket and coke-bottle glasses, and sipped a drink which had a daisy for a swizzle stick. Not able to abide the homosexual resonances of this long history on Wilson's poetry writing, "You, Me and Dupree" eventually clarifies Wilson's heterosexuality by informing us that he was, in fact, writing love poetry in order to win back the affections of a girl he lost earlier in the film.

Despite this history of effeminacy, "real men" actually did read poetry for much of the twentieth century, and that poetry - which decorated the pin-up posters stuck on the walls of their basements and garages - was intended (or thought to be) a clear demonstration of their masculinity. Poetry was a regular part of girly pictures, appearing on postcards, arcade cards, playing cards, ink-blotters, matchbooks and, most famously, the Vargas-girl Esquire centerfold pull-outs and pin-ups. A fair amount of attention has been paid to the visual aspects of these idealized female images, but most commentators focus purely on the airbrushed visuals and the problematic images of the girl next door without investigating the constant presence of the poetry that accompanied those visuals and that, by association, must have had an impact on shaping American masculinity. Some of these poems, such as this one from an ink blotter picturing a busty showgirl in feathers and short skirt -

Showgirls have a philosophyExpressed in the lines of this verse:"To let a fool kiss you is stupid,To let a kiss fool you is worse."

- are clever, epigrammatic rhymes wherein the mastery over the language seems to figure the masculine desire for mastery over the female. Other poems, such as this one from a platinum-blonde, head-and-shoulders, Vargas pull-out pin-up from the May 1942 issue of Esquire, are longer and more elaborate:

Song for a Lost Spring

That was another Spring when we were gay ... And I remember everything so well ...The purpled dusk ... the streets that lost their way ... The lazy hours that held us in their spell;The songs we sang were lovelier than before, The violins were sweet against the night ...And yet the shadows on the tavern floor Foretold a time of panic and of flight;

And so when lightning raced along the sky I knew that vows and pleadings would be vain,You were not meant to watch enchantment die Nor hear the soft and treacherous hiss of rain;That was another Spring that we two shared ... And One was wise ... and there was One who cared!

This sonnet (!) was written by poet laureate of pin-ups, Phil Stack, and no doubt the elaborate verse form and nostalgic tone added a sense of dignity that worked to save the picture from being "just" a girly picture - especially within the context of Esquire's literary and cultural aspirations. Esquire regularly ran such poems alongside their pin-ups and published pin-up calendars with poems on them. To assess the impact of Esquire and the pin-up without accounting in some way for the poetry is an incomplete accounting at best.

It is a curious thing that in the middle of the 1950s "pink scare," Stack should end his first line on the word "gay." For while pin-up poetry, and the act of posting the pin-up on one's wall, worked as a performance of one's masculinity, it was largely a performance of eroticism put on for (and participated in by) other men, and one can't help but think about the homoerotics of two men, or three men, or four men, ogling a pin-up girl. Indeed, when one begins reading this poetry widely, there is a variety among the poems that troubles the heteronormative boy-girl relationship we typically assume that the pictures play to. Sometimes, the verse is spoken by an outside commentator, such as that in the quatrain quoted above. Other times, it's clear that that the woman is speaking the lines. Still other times - as in Stack's sonnet - we're not sure who is speaking the poem or who SHOULD be speaking the poem (the man? the woman? both?) - an ambiguity only enhanced by the verse's use of the first person and played up twice in the last line by the intentionally gender-neutral pronoun "One." Am I the only one to sense that this ambiguity significantly queers the reader's sexual subject position?

Take into consideration the following quatrain from a postcard showing a cartoon redhead whose skirt - a la the famous pic of Marilyn Monroe - is blown up above a steam grate to reveal her stockings and garters:

At last I got around to that line I said I'd dropSo keep yer shirt on buddy, ya' needn't blow yer top!

Who is the "I" in this poem supposed to be? Is it a postcard that a woman would send to a man, or a postcard that a man would send to a man, and what are the various subject positions offered to the card's holder - sender or recipient, male or female - by that poem? That is to ask, how does the poem change the erotic relationship depending on whose mouth it is in and who is "speaking" as the sender finally dropping a line? There's certainly a sort of titillating masquerade or poetic drag/burlesque show going on here that is totally worth examining more closely - one not entirely unlike the Renaissance stage where boy actors dressed up like girls and then kissed other men on stage. This vertigo only increases, I think, by knowing that the author of many of these poems is a male - Phil Stack - essentially speaking, like Cyrano, words of love to other men through the mouth of a surrogate, here (in "Song for a Lost Spring") a woman.

I don't have any answers at the moment except to say that pin-up poetry is much more diverse and complex a social and cultural phenomenon than one would be inclined think. Part of American culture for years and especially during the sexually confusing 1950s, it undoubtedly played a role in shaping men's sense of their sexuality, both in relation to the women pictured, and to the men who would read it as it was posted on walls for everyone to see. What sort of sexual identities are being negotiated in this poetry? Does this dynamic change over the course of the twentieth century? How do the various media - from postcard to fold-out pin-up - shape the poetic and (homo)erotic encounter of these images?

For several essays on the Vargas girl pin-ups, written for a 2001 exhibition of Esquire illustrations at the University of Kansas - check out http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/collection/print/vargas/.

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About Me

Further thoughts on the intersection of poetry and popular culture: this being a record of one man's journey into good bad poetry, not-so-good poetry, commercial poetries, ordinary readers, puns, newspaper poetries, and other instances of poetic language or linguistic insight across multiple media in American culture primarily but not solely since the Civil War

"Mike Chasar's brilliant, witty book is the definitive guide to the growing field of American popular poetry. Empowered by prodigious research and informed by thorough knowledge of the traditional poetry canon, Chasar's five chapters take us deep into the way poetry functioned in the lives of ordinary people." — Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

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"Burma-Shave quatrains, newspaper columns, scrapbooks with thousands of stanzas held together by affection and paste, folksy, pseudonymous, nationally famous radio hosts and the fans who sent them an avalanche of homemade verse: these are just some of the materials taken seriously in Mike Chasar’s extraordinarily memorable, and likely influential, study of popular American verse, and of the popular culture that grew up around it, for most of the twentieth century. Chasar combines the painstaking, arduous archival methods of real historians with the close analyses that we expect from literary critics, applied to verse, to images, and to informative prose ephemera. He persuasively links Williams Carlos Williams’s innovations to roadside signs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the Hallmark card; he may change how you see some eminent writers’ work. Even more than that, however, Chasar should get twenty-first-century readers to sit up and notice the uses that so many Americans, only a couple of generations ago, found for the poetry that they enjoyed. Or, to take up a mode that Chasar appears to be the first to analyze: THIS OLD-TIME VERSE/ HAS LOTS TO SAY/ IF YOU CAN READ IT/ CHASAR’S WAY. His book is an ambitious, serious claim on present-day literary studies; it’s also a surprise, and a delight." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry

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"As Bob Dylan put it, 'We have our ideas about poets,' and we certainly have our ideas about poetry. Lately, those ideas have led to a national outcry in favor of bringing poetry back into American public life. But in Everyday Reading, Mike Chasarshows us that if we can rethink our ideas about poets and poetry, we will find that poems have always been part and parcel of modern life. This is an important—really, a necessary—book for anyone interested in modern poetics, in the history of reading, in the many appearances of poetry in the era of its supposed disappearance." — Virginia Jackson, University of California Irvine, author of Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading

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"This breakthrough study convincingly shows that American poetry in the opening decades of the twentieth century, far from being a largely elitist product that appealed to a limited audience, circulated among a number of different readers to a remarkable degree and left its traces in surprising areas." — Edward Brunner, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, author of Cold War Poetry

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"The lyric spring will never cease creating an emotional pressure, sought after by every searching consciousness—this is what Mike Chasar ... has shown in his book Everyday Reading" — Marina Zagidullina, New Literary Observer

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"[T]he originality of Chasar's close readings, the sheer amount of research informing each chapter, and the speculations on what can be learned from such careful analyses of popular cultural practices make Everyday Reading not so everyday and well worth reading." — Lisa Steinman, The Journal of American History

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"[The] tension between the poetic and the popular is the crux of Chasar's fun and thoughtful book. Chasar is a literary archaeologist. He excavates the poetry in Burma Shave ads, literary scrapbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, old time radio shows, and yes, even Hallmark cards. His close reading of [Paul] Engle's poem 'Easter' as well as the reproduction of the actual card is genius. His thesis is that early-twentieth-century market culture was saturated with poetry (as opposed to 'Poetry') that was participatory rather than exclusionary. This emotional interactivity with poetry, Chasar posits, set the stage for the bizarre matrix of media, commerce, and culture that would come to define the second half of the twentieth century." — Dean Rader, American Literature

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"Everyday Reading goes far in illustrating how poetry played a much larger role in most Americans' lives than it does today. Chasar paints a picture of a more various and ultimately dissident American public than most might have expected, a public for whom poetry was a crucial part of an overall strategy to counter the dominant political, economic, and social paradigms of their era. Written beautifully and researched meticulously, Everyday Reading will prove an important resource for political and cultural historians, literary scholars, and anyone else interested in how poetry transcends the page and becomes an active part of how we spend our days." — Daniel Kane, Journal of American Studies

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"Highly recommended." — Choice

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"Everyday Reading is sure to act as a touchstone for scholars interested in popular digital literature as well as the contemporary avant-garde....[It] concludes with a flourish: an anecdote about the author's grandmother's use of clipped poetry in wartime letters to her husband that evidences Chasar's arguments while remaining personal and poignant. It is a fitting moment for a book that is so innovative, important, and constantly successful" — David Levine, CollegeLiterature

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"Scrapbooking, which appears in other chapters following the first one, becomes the controlling metaphor for Chasar's study—and for reading habits today. With so many cultural products driven by individual tastes and various engines of a global economy, readers inevitably select and construct their own 'tradition,' which may have much or little to do with what they have been taught is important. Chasar's well-documented, thoughtful book offers the larger picture of this phenomenon, of which the battle for the best is only part of the story." — Rhonda Pettit, Reception

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"A brilliantly written book, startling the reader with his thorough research and analysis" — Sheila Erwin, Portland Book Review

Now Available from the University of Iowa Press

"[Poetry after Cultural Studies] should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for." — Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry